For over three decades, Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr. has been one of the world's leading environmental advocates.
He is the founder and president of Waterkeeper
Alliance, the umbrella group for 300 local waterkeeper organizations, in 34
countries, that track down and sue polluters. Under his leadership, Waterkeeper
has grown to become the world's largest clean water advocacy organization.

Around 2005, parents of vaccine-injured children started
encountering Kennedy's speeches and writings about the toxic mercury-based
preservative thimerosal. They embraced new hope that this environmental champion
would finally expose the truth about vaccine injury and win justice for injured
children. Kennedy is known for his fierce and relentless brand of environmental
activism and his advocacy for transparent government and rigorous science. He is
now applying his tenacious energies and sophisticated strategies to exposing the
fraud and corruption within the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
and the pharmaceutical industry. Last month, he launched his new non-profit,
the World
Mercury Project, with vaccine safety advocates Lyn Redwood and Laura Bono,
legends themselves among parents of vaccine-injured children. Autism File executive
editor Rita Shreffler spoke with Kennedy about CDC corruption, pharmaceutical
industry greed, media malpractice and his vision for the World Mercury Project.

(Left to Right) Laura Bono, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and
Lyn Redwood are leading the charge against toxic mercury exposures.

Rita Shreffler: How did you first get involved in the
autism/vaccine controversy?

Robert F. Kennedy: I was dragged kicking and
screaming into this brawl. By the early 2000s, I was fighting multiple lawsuits
on behalf of Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper against coal-fired power plants. I was
touring the country speaking about, among other things, the dangers of mercury
emissions, which, by then, had contaminated virtually every fresh water fish in
America. Following many of these appearances, mothers would approach me. Their
tone was always respectful but mildly scolding. They said that if I was serious
about eliminating the perils of mercury, I needed to look at thimerosal.
Vaccines, they claimed, were the biggest vector for mercury exposure in
children. I really didn't want to get involved because vaccines were pretty
remote from my wheelhouse. I'd always been pro-vaccine. I had all my kids
vaccinated and got my annual flu shot every year. But, I was impressed by these
women. Many of them were professionals: doctors, lawyers, scientists, nurses and
pharmacists. They were overwhelmingly solid, well-educated, extraordinarily
well-informed, rational and persuasive.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. participated in a panel
discussion following the United Nations screening of Trace Amounts on August 27,
2015.Mary Holland

RS: Was there a particular one of these mothers who
finally got you to take the bait?

RFK, JR: Yeah, my brother Max's wife, Vicky Strauss
Kennedy, introduced me to a psychologist named Sarah Bridges. Her son Porter was
vaccine-injured and later diagnosed with autism. After an eight year legal
battle, she had finally received compensation from the vaccine court, which
acknowledged that Porter got his autism, seizures and brain damage from
thimerosal and pertussis vaccines. She persuaded me to start looking into the
science.

RS: That was a daunting request!

RFK, JR: I have always loved science and I'm
comfortable reading it. By then, I'd handled many hundreds of environmental
cases. Almost all of them involved scientific controversies. When I started
reading about thimerosal, I was dumbstruck by the contrast between the
scientific reality and the media consensus. All the network news anchors and
television doctors were assuring the public that there was not a single study
that suggested thimerosal was unsafe or that it could cause autism. After a
short time on PubMed, I'd identified many dozens of studies suggesting that
thimerosal causes autism and a rich library of peer-reviewed literature—more
than 400 published studies—attesting to its deadly toxicity and its causal
connection to a long inventory of neurological injuries and organ damage.

RS: What do we know about thimerosal safety testing?

RFK, JR: First of all, vaccines are not subject to
the safety rigors undergone by other pharmaceuticals in the FDA approval
process. There are no large scale, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.
And, in the one 1930
human study of thimerosal that predated its use in vaccines, all the
subjects injected with thimerosal died. In 2004, an FDA official acknowledged
in testimony before
a Congressional committee, that no government or privately funded study has ever
demonstrated thimerosal's safety. On the other hand, there is plenty of science
suggesting that thimerosal is NOT safe. Several hundred studies available on
PubMed link thimerosal exposure to the neurodevelopmental and immune system
diseases that are now epidemic in the generation of American children born after
the CDC dramatically increased childhood thimerosal exposure starting in 1988.

My book, Thimerosal—Let
the Science Speak, summarizes these studies. The scientific literature
inculpates increased thimerosal
exposure as a culprit in the explosion of ADD, ADHD, speech delay,
narcolepsy, SIDS, ASD, seizure disorder, tics and anaphylaxis, including asthma
and food allergies. According to the CDC, one in six American children—the so
called "thimerosal generation"—now suffers from a developmental disability. We
have published a compendium of
80 published, peer-reviewed studies that strongly suggest a link between
thimerosal exposure and autism.

RS: The CDC started adding to the vaccine schedule in
the late 1980s and all these diseases, including autism, began spiking among
kids in the mid-1990s. That's when parents started seeing perfectly healthy
children regress into autism after receiving their vaccines.

RFK, JR: Yeah. A rising chorus of complaints from
parents and pediatricians linked the new thimerosal-heavy vaccine schedule to an
explosion in autism. In response, the CDC, in 1999, commissioned an in-house
Belgian researcher, Thomas Verstraeten, to study the
Vaccine Safety Datalink, the largest American repository of childhood vaccine
and health records, collected by HMOs. The HMO data clearly showed that the
massive mercury doses in the newly expanded vaccine schedule were causing
runaway epidemics of neurological disorders—ADD, ADHD, speech delay, sleep
disorders, tics and autism among America's children. Verstraeten's original
analysis of those datasets found that thimerosal exposures increased autism risk
by 760%. The CDC now knew the cause of the autism epidemic.

RS: How did the CDC react to the revelations in the
Verstraeten study?

RFK, JR: The vaccine branch called an emergency
meeting of regulators from WHO, FDA, vaccine industry stakeholders and the
American Academy of Pediatrics at the
Simpsonwood
Conferences and Retreat Center in Norcross, Georgia. They reportedly held the
meeting off the CDC campus to shield the deliberations from freedom of
information requests. During a frantic two-day debate, that group decided to
embargo Verstraeten's study. The CDC then pushed Verstraeten aside and assembled
a team of industry and CDC scientists to rework the study using dodgy
statistical devices to make the autism signal disappear. After four increasingly
deceptive iterations, that team succeeded in eliminating the signal linking
thimerosal with autism and a half dozen other neurodevelopmental disorders. The
CDC published that version and told the public that thimerosal was safe. When
parents asked to see the raw data, the CDC claimed that it had somehow "lost"
all the raw data so that no independent group could check this result.

RS: Right, that's when the CDC went into the business of
creating its notorious phony epidemiological studies?

RFK, JR: Exactly. Over the next two years, the CDC
worked with the pharmaceutical industry to gin up seven epidemiological
studies that purport to exculpate thimerosal from causing the autism
epidemic. None of these studies pretend to be safety studies. Each of them
simply looked for the presence of a small number of designated diseases in
specific populations exposed to thimerosal. All of them are fatally flawed due
to improper methodologies or deliberate fraud. Nevertheless, these are the
studies that the CDC lists on its website—and that its spokespeople regularly
cite—to defend mercury in vaccines. It's worth noting that the CDC itself has so
little faith in these studies that it derailed a scheduled 2012 review of their
underlying science by the Institute of Medicine (IOM)
and killed a 2006 review of thimerosal safety by the National Toxicology
Program. Under CDC pressure, the Institute of Medicine made the astonishing
declaration, in 2004, that, based on those seven flawed studies, the science was
settled and no new studies on the causative relationship between thimerosal and
autism should be undertaken or funded. That declaration effectively cut off
support for any scientist who wants to investigate the link.

RS: The CDC touts those seven epidemiological studies
across the globe as evidence of thimerosal safety.

RFK, JR: Yes, and CDC and IOM officials left behind
a very troubling email trail that makes it clear that those studies were
deliberately manufactured to exonerate thimerosal. By the time I came across
them, I was accustomed to dissecting research papers and spotting junk science.
In my line, we call it "tobacco science" and the hired guns who generate it "biostitutes".
The CDC's primary data manager on its widely touted Danish studies was a
notorious con man and professional biostitute named Poul
Thorsen (Thorsen),
who actually pocketed the million dollars the CDC paid him to do the research.
He is currently under indictment on 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering
by the U.S. Justice Department and is the star of the OIG's Most Wanted List.
Thorsen is on the run from the FBI in Europe. Nevertheless, the CDC still uses
Thorsen's studies as proof of thimerosal safety.

RS: Besides reading the science, did you do any kind of
research?

RFK, JR: I also spoke to the leading researchers,
like [University of Kentucky Chemistry Department, Chairman, Toxicologist] Dr.
Boyd Haley, and I called the researchers and
experts at the federal agencies to get help understanding what I was reading. I
spoke to the IOM's Dr. Kathleen Stratton and pharmaceutical industry spokesman,
Dr. Paul
Offit.

RS: Well there's a pair of villains! How did the
conversations go?

RFK, JR: Amicably. I had no antipathy toward either
of them at that time. I had no clue about the pivotal role they both had played
in deceiving the public about thimerosal safety. Both of them spoke to me
willingly. Offit expressed admiration for my father, which is an effective way
to butter me up. I asked them both the obvious question: "Why do we advise
pregnant women to steer clear of fish because of neurotoxic mercury and yet
inject much larger doses of mercury into pregnant women and babies?" They both
repeated to me the thread worn industry canard that the "Ethyl
mercury in vaccines is not as dangerous as the methyl mercury in fish" which
everyone admits is highly neurotoxic. Offit explained to me that Ethylmercury wasn't toxic
because it leaves the human body so quickly.

RS: What was your reaction?

RFK, JR: By then, I'd read Burbacher's monkey
studies which confirmed Offit's assertion that the ethyl mercury from vaccines
rapidly left the blood. But, Burbacher had shown the ethyl mercury was not being
excreted from the body as Offit implied during our telephone conversation.
Instead, it was going directly into the brain, where it rapidly metabolized into
highly toxic inorganic mercury, and then lodged there, creating inflammation and
brain damage. Burbacher had shown that inorganic mercury remains in the brain
for years. Instead of being evidence of its safety, as Offit represented, ethyl
mercury's penchant for disappearing quickly from the blood was testimony to its
extreme peril; it was disappearing due to the ease with which it crossed the
blood-brain barrier! Ethyl mercury used in vaccines was both far more persistent
and far more toxic than the methyl mercury found in fish. The Guzzi study, in
2012, showed the ethyl mercury was 50 times as toxic to cells. When I mentioned
the Burbacher study to Stratton and Offit, they both went silent. It was obvious
that they were aware of the study. THEY BOTH KNEW that science had refuted what
they were telling me. They were accustomed to talking to journalists who seem to
have an allergy to reading science and were content to parrot their
reassurances.

RS: What did Offit say when you confronted him?

RFK, JR: Well, he clearly knew that he was lying and
now he knew that I knew he was lying. There was a long awkward pause. Then he
had this kind of Porky Pig "Epity, epity, epity, what?" moment after which, he
launched into what is now, to me, a familiar Paul Offit soft shoe routine. He
said, "Well, you're right, Robert, there is no definitive study. It's really a
whole mosaic of studies…" And then, he had to go.

RS: What was Stratton's reaction?

RFK, JR: Stratton was much more candid. She just
came out and said, "Well, obviously it's toxic. When you give it to mice, bad
things happen and, when you give it to rats, they do weird things. It can't be
good for humans. That's why we are taking it out of all vaccines!" I took the
precaution of taping both these conversations, by the way.

RS: So, what was your response?

RFK, JR: In a single day, I had spoken to the two
top advocates for the use of thimerosal in vaccines and I caught them both
lying. A few days later, I heard Offit repeat his "good mercury/bad mercury" fib
during an interview on NPR. I thought to myself, "This man is a thorough
charlatan, a snake oil salesman and he has everyone flimflammed." That made me
angry. After that, I learned that he was also venal.

RS: What do you mean "venal"?

RFK, JR: Well, my original assumption was that he
was lying in service to the vaccine program. I later learned that vaccines were
a lavishly profitable enterprise for Dr. Offit.

RS: How so?

RFK, JR: He is on permanent retainer to Merck to
"right vaccine wrongs". And, both Merck and the CDC have rewarded his service
with extraordinarily lucrative opportunities. In 1999, the CDC allowed him to
sit on the committee that voted the rotavirus vaccine onto the schedule, even
though he was working on his own rotavirus patent. Electing not to recuse
himself, he cast his vote to add rotavirus to the schedule. That version of the
rotavirus vaccine caused so many agonizing childhood deaths from intussusception
that the CDC had to withdraw it a year later, making room for Offit's version, a
turn of events that made him a vaccine tycoon. His rotavirus vaccine patent sold
for $182 million; his cut was at least $29 million. When I learned about this
caper and his other money schemes, I just thought, "Well, he's a hoodlum."

RS: He's also a misogynist and a bully.

RFK, JR: It's disturbing because the media treats
him like a deity. And, like all bullies, he's a coward. He dismisses women who
question him as superstitious hysterics. He lobs vicious bombs at the mothers of
vaccine-injured children from the editorial pages and national TV shows which
give him a platform for his poison. But, he refuses to debate me or anyone else
who knows what they are talking about.

RS: Do you think, when Paul Offit says that babies could
safely be given 10,000 vaccines at the same time, that he really believes that?

RFK, JR: I don't feel competent to psychoanalyze
Offit. It's hard to look into another person's mind. And Offit's brain has got
to be a really dark and scary zip code where I don't really want to spend time.
In his defense, we all have some capacity for self-deception and it's possible
that Offit is as gifted at deceiving himself as he is at deceiving the public.
Upton Sinclair observed that, "It's difficult to get a man to understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." But I do
think it's more likely that he knows that what he's saying is dishonest. For
years, he claimed Bill Thompson's 2004 study was "the definitive proof" of
thimerosal safety. He's been silent about that since Thompson disavowed his own
study. That suggests a purposeful mendacity. Like a lot of other people, Offit
seems to have made the self-serving calculation that all of the dead and damaged
children are just collateral damage—unfortunate sacrifices in a program that
serves the greater good.

RS: Is that even a legitimate moral calculation?

RFK, JR: You mean to kill one child in order to save
fifty? Ethicists and theologians could argue the point. But that isn't Offit's
real moral dilemma. Offit's moral Donnybrook is his absolutist defense of the
industry position that all vaccines are always safe for all people and that the
safety of thimerosal is unassailable. That approach has unnecessarily damaged
vulnerable subgroups that could easily have been protected and sacrificed
millions of kids, not for the greater good but for the bottom line. As the
vaccine industry's lead pitchman for thimerosal, Offit's been extraordinarily
successful at crafting a persuasive alternative to fact-based reality and
selling it like a carnival barker. He has made himself the high priest of the
weird dogma that it's somehow safe to inject mercury into babies.

RS: You once described the autism epidemic as a
holocaust. That characterization made many parents feel that someone finally
understood their experience.

RFK, JR: Yeah. I later apologized because the press
turned my use of that word into a distraction. My apology was heartfelt. There
is a legitimate argument that that term is proprietary to the victims of Hitler.
Hitler's campaign to purposefully exterminate an entire race with industrial
efficiency. I had appropriated the term to describe the autism epidemic after
searching vainly for some other analogies with the power to capture the
magnitude and monstrosity of this global tragedy. Just spend some time with a
child who has severe autism. Life for these children is an endless agonizing
progression of twilight and terror. The tormenting gut aches, excruciating
sensory sensitivities, the serial head banging and screaming, the isolation and
perpetual joylessness. The entire family is permanently devastated. Now multiply
that by ten million. I felt we owed it to the injured children and their
families to be courageous in describing their tragedy in language that expressed
the horror of their suffering and the willfulness of its architects. Offit is
the primary engineer and pivotal figure for a system that has injured millions
of children. Rabbi William Handler regularly characterizes the epidemic as a
holocaust, which, I suppose, he has a right to do since he is a holocaust
survivor.

RS: Then do you think this is just about the money for
Offit?

RFK, JR: I don't know. I've seen these characters
over my career—these industry hired guns. Murray Walker of the Tobacco
Institute, who was the inspiration for the scoundrel, Nick Naylor, in Thank
You for Smoking, Donna Farmer from Monsanto, Fred Singer for the carbon
industry, Brooke Alexander for the American Petroleum Institute, Myron Ebell of
the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Offit has probably made more money from
pharma than all of them put together. From my vantage, all of these shills seem
to have some driving impulse beyond raw greed.

RS: You mean like a sociopath or a sadist?

RFK, JR: I'm not sure. I know that, to parents of
injured children, it seems like it all has to be purposeful malevolence. But it
might be as simple as arrogance. They take on this awesome power to make these
life or death decisions over large populations and even to take parenting
decisions away from mothers and fathers. It must make a person feel like God.
Consider the corrupting effect of this God-like power. Offit has hinted
publicly, he believes it's OK to lie; it's OK for doctors and scientists to lie
to protect the vaccine program. He gets indignant when people discuss vaccine
safety who are not doctors or scientists. He becomes enraged when people
question him. Last month, he told the parent of an injured child to "F*** off."
He later said he didn't realize he was being taped. That's the original sin,
isn't it— pride? The desire to make oneself a deity. That was the pitfall at
Eden and then at Babel.

RS: So that conversation with Offit was a turning point
for you?

RFK, JR: Yes, and then, the thing that pushed me
over the edge was when Lyn Redwood gave me a copy of the Simpsonwood
transcripts. I published excerpts simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon in
2005. As I mentioned earlier, Simpsonwood was a secretive convocation of
America's leading public health officials, from the CDC, FDA, WHO, AAP and all
the pharmaceutical companies who gathered to discuss strategies for dealing with
Tom Verstraeten's damning revelations. It's still unclear whether the
participants knew that someone was tape recording their conference. And, as you
read this transcript, you can feel the fear and horror as these public health
bureaucrats realize what they have done. And then, you can watch as they all
begin conspiring frantically about how to hide their mistake! It was
astonishing! I couldn't believe what I was reading.

RS: I was really excited to hear about the World Mercury
Project. Can you tell our readers how the organization came to be?

RFK, JR: The World Mercury Project emerged from the
promotion we were doing for the film
Trace Amounts. I had travelled to a dozen cities, with
Director Eric Gladen, to screen the show, speak, and fight the wave of vaccine
mandates in 2015, when the pharmaceutical industry tried to leverage a
Disneyland measles outbreak into a new California gold rush. When our work with
the film came to a close, I recognized that even a committed movement of
extraordinarily talented activists would never move the needle on this issue.
The forces arrayed against us were just too powerful. We needed a paid
professional staff who awaken every morning thinking of nothing except how to
solve this problem. How to force a national debate and expose the phony science
and CDC corruption. How to use the most sophisticated social media, and internet
marketing and what Martin Luther King called the "tools of advocacy": agitation,
legislation, litigation, education, and media and grass roots activism.

RS: And I was personally very excited to see that you
have partnered with Lyn Redwood who is now the executive director of World
Mercury Project. How did that come about?

RFK, JR: I've been working with Lyn Redwood in one
way or another since around 2005. She is an extraordinary advocate. Lyn is a
registered nurse. Her child was one of the first to experience regressive autism
following a series of thimerosal vaccines. Her advocacy includes her testimony
before Congress and her work on the seminal book EVIDENCE
OF HARM with David Kirby. She co-founded and ran
SafeMinds. She helped build the first grassroots organizations that mobilized
the parents of injured children around the thimerosal issue. She has been an
advisor to HHS and the Department of Defense and has encyclopedic knowledge of
the history of thimerosal and the relevant laws, regulations and court cases.
She is disciplined, science-based and extremely well organized with good
judgment and a shrewd strategic mind. Lyn had some health problems. When those
resolved about eight months later, we quickly assembled a team, raised some
money, and put together a very forceful, aggressive campaign that I believe will
finally expose the truth.

Lyn Redwood and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. inWashington, DC
in April, 2014 after meeting with HHS, CDC and FDA officials along with Mark
Hyman to discuss their concerns regarding the continued use of thimerosal-containing
vaccines in pregnant women, infants and children.

RS: Would removing mercury from vaccines guarantee us
safe vaccines?

RFK, JR: No. There are other highly toxic vaccine
ingredients that must be removed. Aluminum is an example. But the larger problem
is that the entire vaccine program is in disarray. As CDC senior vaccine safety
scientist Dr. William Thompson has pointed out, one of the primary fallouts of
the mercury/autism debate is that it has paralyzed science at the CDC. So we
know very little about vaccine safety or efficacy for that matter. It's
undeniable that vaccines can cause terrible injuries and even death to
vulnerable subgroups. There is also an assumption that they do more good than
harm. That may not be true for all vaccines. Certain vaccines may cause more
harm—thimerosal-laden flu and Hepatitis B vaccines come to mind. Even with
Gardasil and MMR, which don't contain thimerosal, it's very difficult to support
industry claims for their safety or efficacy. No one can answer these questions
honestly. The efficacy and safety studies that we would need to answer these
questions have never been performed and the science that has been done has
raised a lot of flags that should make reasonable people worry. Most Americans
just assume the CDC has done these studies and answered these questions. People
would be shocked if they knew how shoddy the CDC's science really is.

RS: What do you imagine would happen to autism rates if
the CDC removed thimerosal from American vaccines?

RFK, JR: In Denmark, ASD rates dropped 30% when the
Danish government ordered removal of mercury in 1992. So that's a bellwether.
The drop would likely be more dramatic in this country because the Danes had a
very small amount of thimerosal-containing vaccines. We use much more thimerosal
than the Danes ever allowed. Katie Wright suggests that the Danes never had the
severe brand of autism that is now common in America. Having said that, we need
to remember that there are many other sources of mercury in the environment,
including dental amalgams, and power plant emissions, both of which have
well-documented links to autism. There is also a lot of thimerosal
still in medicines. The highest autism rates in the US are among Somali
immigrants in Minnesota. That terrible epidemic is probably related to
skin-lightening creams that are ubiquitous in that community. Those creams are
loaded with mercury. Plus, there are other toxins that may cause damage in the
same parts of the brain as mercury—glyphosate, for example—or that may have a
synergistic relationship with mercury in triggering autism.

RS: Why is no one studying the causes of autism?

RFK, JR: That's part of the blowback from the CDC's
efforts to cover its tracks on thimerosal. No one—not the FDA, CDC, IOM, NIH or
EPA, nor the universities—are even pretending to study the environmental causes
of the epidemics in pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders or food allergies.
The former president of Merck's vaccine division acknowledged to me recently
that vaccines are a likely culprit in the food allergy epidemic, but he told me
that no one is studying it. How can that possibly be?

RS: Well, let me ask you that. How is it possible?

RFK, JR: The CDC has gone to monumental lengths to
make sure no one performs studies that might even inadvertently expose the link
between thimerosal and autism. In 2004, the CDC arm-twisted the IOM into making
the extraordinary declaration that any questions on the links between vaccines
and these diseases had been settled and ought never to be studied again. When
does a scientist ever say anything like that? In science, nothing is ever
settled. Everything is a hypothesis subject to revision when contrary evidence
emerges. Science says you always keep investigating and questioning assumptions.
That IOM declaration was the opposite of science. It was like the Catholic
Church silencing Copernicus because of its fear that scientific knowledge might
endanger the institution. The CDC then effectively closed access to the Vaccine
Safety Data link—America's largest repository for vaccine safety information—and
forced FDA and the IOM to abandon their own scheduled studies of thimerosal
toxicity. The CDC has effectively stopped everyone from studying the links.
Scientists who try to do the research get blackballed and the journals are too
intimidated to publish research that raises questions about vaccine or
thimerosal safety.

RS: Yes, it seems odd to say, "No studies of this should
ever be done."

RFK, JR: It's quite extraordinary. This is why most
of the good science now is coming from abroad. To give American scientists
busywork, the NIH encourages them to study the genetics of autism—so there is
lots of money going down that rathole. Or they do just plain silly studies. They
look at paternal age or maternal drinking which haven't changed enough to
explain the epidemic numbers we are seeing over the past 30 years. In this way,
the CDC and NIH and the pharmaceutical companies have compromised all the great
universities and research centers—MIT, UC Davis, the Simons Foundation,
Princeton and Yale, among many others. So these researchers all get their grant
money. But, of course, they will never find the cause. We know that the epidemic
is caused by environmental toxins. As Dr. Boyd Haley says, "Genes don't cause
epidemics." Genes can provide vulnerabilities, but you need an environmental
toxin. Yet no one is looking for the toxin. It's like studying the genetic
causes of sunburn without looking at the role of the sun! It's all designed to
keep us from learning answers that might embarrass the CDC.

RS: And the ultimate beneficiary is Pharma?

RFK, JR: Vaccines have become a $30 billion dollar
bonanza for Pharma and vaccine makers. Just like the tobacco, oil and chemical
industries, Pharma employs strategies to get sham science published and to block
the kind of science that threatens bottom lines. The food industry and corporate
agriculture use the same tactics and, often, the same scientists and PR firms.
These fellows have us swimming around in a toxic soup! The science journals and
universities have been corrupted. Science today is rarely a search for
existential truth. There's not much money in that. We know very little about
glyphosate even though it's infiltrated our food supply and our bodies.
Stephanie Seneff at MIT has shown that glyphosate operates along the same
toxicity pathways as mercury in the brain.

RS: Why don't pediatricians object?

RFK, JR: Well, there are many pediatricians who have
grave doubts about thimerosal safety and would like better science. I meet many
pediatricians who are reticent about the schedule and have seen vaccine damage
in their patients, but they are terrified to speak out. They know they will face
intimidation by their peers. There's a name for this phenomenon. It's called the
"Semmelweis reflex". Ignaz Semmelweis was the obstetrician who first proposed
antiseptic procedures. His work implied that physicians using the current
protocols were actually making people sick. The medical community ridiculed and
marginalized him, and took away his medical practice. I show in my thimerosal
book how the medical community destroyed the career of British physician and
epidemiologist, Alice Stewart, when she demonstrated that the routine practice
of giving x-rays to pregnant women was causing cancer in their children. Herbert
Needleman and Rachel Carson got the same treatment. In the same way, today's
doctors who are brave enough to talk about vaccine safety concerns often get
punished. Look what happened to Andy Wakefield, Mark Geier, Bob Sears, and Anju
Usman. These were all courageous physicians, the kind that I would want caring
for my children. They each made the career mistake of standing up for their
patients, acting as healers, questioning authority and speaking truth to power.
The medical establishment made examples of them.

RS: But why don't more pediatricians stand up and speak
out?

RFK, JR: Most pediatricians are not reading the
research science. In my own experience, I find that even the ones that get the
journals don't read beyond the abstracts, which rarely contain the controversial
findings. Pediatricians are overworked so they trust the CDC and AAP to tell
them what the science says. The AAP is totally co-opted by Pharma dollars. And
individual physicians are subject to perverse economic incentives from Pharma
and insurers to keep them in line.

RS: What do you mean by perverse incentives?

RFK, JR: A few weeks ago, someone gave me a Blue
Cross Blue Shield Compensation and Bonus Program for pediatricians. The program
provided a $40 bonus to the pediatrician for every on-time vaccine up to $400
per child. A typical practice could include 1500 children. So that is a good
half million dollar annual incentive to vaccinate according to the schedule and
not to ask too many questions about safety. Even worse, the program punishes
doctors who fail to fully vaccinate at least 63% of their practice on time.
Those doctors lose 100% of the bonus. The system is designed to pressure
pediatricians to vaccinate even when there are contraindications. It explains
why vaccine-hesitant parents encounter open hostility from pediatricians when
they express reticence or concern. It explains why pediatricians rarely fully
inform each patient about vaccine risks and side effects as the law requires.

RS: What do you and the World Mercury Project team hope
to accomplish?

RFK, JR: Our ultimate goal is to get mercury and
other metals out of vaccines and medical products including dental amalgams. We
also aim to reduce or eliminate other mercury exposures from industry, mining,
energy production and consumer products. We want safe vaccines, robust
transparent science and an honest and independent regulatory agency focused
narrowly on public health rather than industry profit.

RS: How do you hope to advance this strategically?

RFK, JR: Our immediate efforts center on forcing a
debate in the press—making reporters actually look at the science and realize
they've been lied to and bamboozled by the hucksters at the CDC.

RS: What would be the cost of switching to non-thimerosal
vaccines?

RFK, JR: I've seen industry estimates of 20 cents
per vaccine which is a relatively trivial price. But Professor José Dórea just
published a peer-reviewed answer to this question in the November issue of Environmental
Research. He estimates the cost at less than 1¢ per vaccine. The total
global cost would be less than the $2 million annually for vaccines for the100
million children currently receiving thimerosal-containing vaccines. That is
less than the lifetime cost of caring for a single child with autism. The
industry already produces non-thimerosal versions of all these vaccines so the
switch would be quick.

RS: I've heard you talk about captive regulatory
agencies, do you mean the CDC?

RFK, JR: The CDC is a subsidiary of the
pharmaceutical industry. The agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and
purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually. Congressman Dave Weldon
has pointed out that the primary metric for success across the CDC is how many
vaccines the agency sells and how successfully the agency expands its vaccine
program—regardless of any negative effects on human health. Weldon exposed how
the Immunization Safety Office, which is supposed to ensure vaccine efficacy and
safety, has become subsumed in that metric. The scientists in that part of the
agency should no longer be considered part of the public safety sector. Their
function is to promote vaccines. As Dr. Thompson has attested, they are
routinely ordered to destroy, manipulate and conceal evidence of adverse vaccine
reactions in order to protect that ultimate metric. The CDC should not be the
agency that we are relying on for oversight of the vaccine program. It's the hen
guarding the wolf house. It's not just the CDC. Virtually all the institutions
that are supposed to stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children
have been compromised.

RS: When you say that all the institutions have been
compromised, who are you really talking about?

RFK, JR: Congress, the regulatory agencies, FDA and
CDC, the IOM, the NIH, the AAP, the science journals, the university science
departments and the press. Pharma has a broad reach.

RS: Are you saying that Pharma also corrupts our
nation's lawmakers?

RFK, JR: Pharma is the largest lobbyist in
Washington. It now has more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are Congress
people. The industry spends twice as much on lobbying as oil and gas and almost
four times as much as the defense and aerospace industries. Imagine that!
Congress was already drowning in Pharma money in 1986 when it gave those
companies immunity from lawsuits arising from vaccine injury. In that way,
vaccine makers rid themselves of the courts and the lawyers. With Congress and
the regulatory agencies already captured, Pharma succeeded in thereby
eliminating the final check and balance against bad corporate behavior in a free
market. Once they were liberated from liability, vaccines became a major
industry profit center. It was that legislation that launched the vaccine
bonanza that began in 1988.

RS: What has been the role of the press?

RFK, JR: The media is complicit in the cataclysm. At
least part of the reason is financial. America is one of only two nations in the
world that allows pharmaceutical ads on television. Drug companies are the
largest advertisers on TV and radio. They spend $3-$5.4 billion annually to
saturate the airwaves with 80 advertisements every hour. Anyone who watches
network news quickly understands that it has devolved into a vehicle for selling
pharmaceuticals. That lucre seems to have neutralized the news divisions at CNN,
ABC, NBC and CBS. Fox News alone is uncorrupted, but only because its shameless
purpose, from its inception, has been to promote the ascendancy of corporate
power. Fox's former CEO, Roger Ailes, was sympathetic with the cause but he told
me that he would have to fire any of his hosts who allowed me on his network to
discuss mercury in vaccines or autism if I cost them an advertiser. He said,
"Bobby, if I let you on to talk about vaccines, Rupert would be on the phone
with me in ten minutes."

RS: What about the national environmental groups?

RFK, JR: Sadly, AWOL.

RS: You mentioned the science journals?

RFK, JR: The science journals are also corrupted.
It's common for these journals to receive half or more of their income from
pharma ads and reprint orders. Many of them are owned by drug companies. Dr.
Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and
Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the world's
two preeminent science journals, have both recently declared that half of their
articles are untrue—concocted by authors compromised by "flagrant conflicts of
interest." Pharma's stranglehold on the journals keeps independent vaccine
safety science from ever getting published. Just this month, the Swiss journal, Frontiers
in Public Health, cancelled publication of the first vaccinated/unvaccinated
study. The study showed that vaccinated children had less measles and rubella,
but four times as many neurological disorders—including autism –and 30 times the
incidence of allergies. Frontiers panicked after it put up the abstract
and got 78,000 views in a day and, presumably, a lot of heat from pharma. I
could give you a parade of other examples of great studies that either can't
find a publisher, or get published and then taken down as soon as the journals
feel the heat. As it turns out, the people who run those journals are no
Bravehearts. Self-preservation is the overriding motivation.

RS: Is there a conspiracy among the government agencies
and the press?

RFK, JR: Certainly, there is an overt conspiracy by
a small group within the CDC vaccine division. It's explicit. You can watch it
unfold if you read the Simpsonwood transcripts and the related emails which you
can find on
the World Mercury Project website. It's chilling. You have all these bureaucrats
and industry officials sitting there staring at the CDC's internal study that
proves that thimerosal caused the autism epidemic. Their focus quickly moves
away from a public health concern to a cover-up—how to hide what they've done
from the public. One of the Simpsonwood attendees, University of Colorado
immunologist, Dr. Robert Johnson, declares to the group that he is not going to
allow his newborn grandson to receive thimerosal containing vaccines. Yet none
of the meeting participants ever came forward to warn the public of the risks to
THEIR children's health! Instead, they all agree to keep the study secret. We
know the names of the conspirators. These particular guys all ought to be
playing Rock Hockey in Spandau with three hots and a cot in the Albert Speer
suite. I don't know how they live with it. I guess they just pray that there is
no God and no such thing as a divine justice. We know what Jesus said about
people who harm little children. It was the single sin he considered
unforgiveable.

RS: But certainly it's a small group that conspired?

RFK, JR: Right. But then, there were a lot of power
centers—the industry, the media, the political leaders, the medical
community—that found it in their own self-interest to not scrutinize or question
the CDC narrative too closely. In that way, a tiny explicit conspiracy made the
evolutionary leap to widespread orthodoxy. Pharma's unlimited reach and wealth
helped cement the consensus. That proliferation of the gospel swept up the other
regulators, the press, the environmental groups, the science journals, the AAP,
the AMA and other medical associations, and the pediatricians in a kind of
consensus dogma much larger than the explicit conspiracy. It's akin to what
happened to the Catholic Church during the pedophile scandal. The institution
suddenly became more important than the children it was supposed to protect.
Only a few individuals were actively involved in raping children and shuffling
known pedophile priests to unsuspecting dioceses. But everyone became
complicit—from the bishops and priests, the doctors, to the press and police.
You can judge the power of the orthodoxy by the way it often swept up the
parents of abused children and even the victims. It was in everyone's
self-interest to keep their mouths shut. Orthodoxies don't require overt
collusion. The same thing happened with the NFL in the concussion scandal.

RS: You use the term orthodoxy—and in some ways this is
like a religion, isn't it?

RFK, JR: It's exactly like religion. It's certainly
not science. It's blind faith in the CDC's word about what the science says.
It's like the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church kept the scriptures in
Latin, a language Jesus never spoke, so that no one could read them except the
priests and everyone just had to take their word for what God says. Among
American journalists, this cult-like parroting of the CDC's safety assurances
has become a kind of lazy man's science. There's never any fact checking.
There's this pervasive insistence that we not talk about vaccine safety and
never question the government. Instead of scientific argument, the debate has
deteriorated into "argument by credential". Reporters cite government safety
assurances as if the CDC was a divine authority. Also, it's corollary "argument
by insult." Scientists and celebrities and bereaved mothers who question vaccine
safety are shamed, marginalized and black-balled. It's like the way the
Inquisition burned religious heretics. Like other theologies, this one comes
with its own set of taboos and superstitions and mythologies. You hear these
repeated over and over like a Gregorian chant. "There is no mercury in
vaccines." "The mercury came out and autism rates continued climbing." "Multiple
studies have proven it safe." "Ethyl mercury is non-toxic." "The hysteria all
began with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his retracted study in The Lancet."
Of course, all of these articles of faith are patently and demonstrably false.
They had to make a religion out of it because the facts wouldn't countenance
their assertions. And as with all orthodoxies, it's cruel and occasionally
lethal.

RS: How does the press help to enforce the orthodoxy?

RFK, JR: Newspapers and electronic media outlets
have suppressed legitimate debate over vaccine safety or the ongoing corruption
scandals at the CDC. They allow Paul Offit and other pharma shills almost
unlimited use of the airwaves to spout Pharma propaganda—always unquestioned and
unanswered. Newspapers won't publish Op Eds or letters or comments from vaccine
safety advocates. Even alternative press—like Huffington Post, Drudge Report,
Salon, Slate and Mother Jones won't allow discussion—and these are
supposedly the antidote to a corporate controlled media. Astonishingly, many
journalists openly advocate the censoring of any discussion about vaccine
safety.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Polly Tommey join forces to
educate the public on vaccine injury.Josh Coleman

RS: When parents first started talking to the media
about thimerosal around 2002, we could get a lot of good coverage. Now it's
nearly impossible to get any mainstream press at all, even at the local level.
What has your experience been like in getting coverage on the link between
thimerosal and autism?

RFK, JR: It's Kafkaesque. It's an impenetrable
cocoon of censorship. Talking to reporters about this is like dealing with the
Borg. Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson calls it the most censored story
of the century. It's bewildering for me to see the American press cowed before
government officials. It ought to be humiliating. Daniel Schulman pointed out in
the Columbia Journalism Review that all this journalistic reticence is
rooted in fear. He called the controversy "career ending" for journalists.
Reporters know if they talk about this, they're going to lose their jobs. Nobody
reads the science. Reporters don't even read the abstracts. I've yet to find a
reporter—even so-called science reporters like Keith Kloor who writes about this
issue regularly—who has read the relevant science. It is really quite
frightening. The blackout is complete, as DeNiro learned when he tried to
screen Vaxxed in SoHo. They have abolished discussion from the public
square. The American press has a lot of explaining to do and hopefully a lot of
soul-searching.

RS: Have you personally experienced censorship in
speaking out about injuries caused by thimerosal-containing vaccines?

RFK, JR: Yes, many times. I could spend this entire
interview chronicling the stories. It would soon sound like whining. The biggest
disappointment has been The New York Times. I love that paper; it's such
a critical institution for our country and our democracy! They made the dreadful
mistake, cheerleading the run up to the Iraq War. They were manipulated by
undeserving public officials. They had to apologize for leading our country into
that costly quagmire. Their mistake on the thimerosal issue has been even more
costly. I've met and corresponded repeatedly with the reporters, columnists, the
science editors, editorial board and the public editor. I've written letter
after letter. I brought a squadron of scientists and dragged a pile of
scientific studies into a meeting with the paper's editorial board. They gave me
the meeting, but all of them were sullen and impervious. They refused to even
look at the studies. It's tragic because their evangelical message discipline on
thimerosal's supposed safety has anointed the CDC narrative with moral authority
among less rigorous news outlets.

RS: Is it all about the advertising dollars then?

RFK, JR: It's more complex. The media's silence on
this issue is not simply a quid pro quo for billions of dollars of annual
pharmaceutical advertising. Most reporters and media outlets accept the muzzle
because they think they are safeguarding public health. They believe that
allowing debate about vaccine safety and CDC corruption may cause the public to
stop vaccinating.

Julianna Pearce

RS: Do you think that's a legitimate rationale?

RFK, JR: It's not black and white. There have been
times in American history when journalists have agreed, legitimately, to hold
stories for brief periods of time for national security reasons but it's always
a slippery slope. And, this situation is unique. The embargo has lasted a
decade. Journalism is wandering into a minefield when media outlets take on the
responsibility of protecting Americans from dangerous knowledge. Democracy is
messy and difficult, but I think journalists nearly always need to come down on
the side of transparency. And I don't think that coming clean will destroy the
vaccine program. As the late NIH Director Bernadine Healy said, "Americans are
smarter than that." Healy believed that a vigorous and open debate would not
diminish but rather strengthen the vaccine program.

RS: Is there any evidence that insulation from scrutiny
has actually strengthened the vaccine program?

RFK, JR: That's the irony. Rather than strengthening
public support for vaccines, the laws that shield the vaccine industry from
lawsuits combined with the absence of political and press scrutiny, have
emboldened the CDC to sanction increasingly reckless conduct by vaccine makers.
Because the press won't cover CDC corruption, we now have a rogue agency that's
completely unaccountable. Its senior vaccine safety scientist has just come
forward to admit that the CDC routinely destroys data. Its key studies are
fraudulent. If what Dr. Thompson is saying is true, the implications are
monumental. It means that CDC officials knowingly sanctioned the unnecessary
injection of brain killing poison into an entire generation of American
children, and children all over the world.

RS: What about the vaccine companies?

RFK, JR: The pharmaceutical companies know that
nothing they do will be questioned when it comes to vaccines. Look, just use
common sense. Every year, we see million, or even billion-dollar litigation
settlements against Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Glaxo, Abbott, and Lilly for false
marketing, off label uses, adulterated products, falsifying science, kickbacks
and fraudulent safety data in their pharmaceutical products. Just a couple
months ago, vaccine maker Glaxo Smith Kline paid $20 million to the SEC to
settle charges of funneling $489 million in bribes to physicians in China. We
see shenanigans like that all the time in the United States and there's this
whole industry of trial lawyers making very good livelihoods telling those
stories to juries. How do you imagine those same companies would behave if they
suddenly got rid of the lawyers, the courts, the depositions, the class action
lawsuits, and the multi-district litigations? What would happen if they then got
rid of the press? Why in the world do we think that these same companies have
somehow made their vaccine programs off limits to these crooked strategies? It's
a comical fiction. You have to be almost purposefully naive to believe it. And
yet, America's most prestigious media outlets have all been gulled into
swallowing it.

RS: How do we get the mainstream media to finally cover
this issue honestly?

RFK, JR: We have to make this such a potent presence
on social media that it gives mainstream reporters a sense they can now proceed
safely. We just need a few journalists to break rank, look at the science and
write the truth. The moment we succeed in forcing the debate, this entire
pretense will collapse. Everyone will see that the emperor has no clothes. By
stacking fraud upon fraud upon fraud, the CDC has created an edifice so high, so
wobbly and so fragile that a light breeze of scrutiny will bring the whole thing
tumbling down. You can accomplish the same thing—forcing debate—with a lawsuit
or you can do it with a single courageous news outlet. If the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution did a series on CDC corruption or if 60 Minutes did
a segment investigating the science? Game over! CDC has no science to support
its position that isn't blatantly fraudulent. These fabricated epidemiological
studies are comical. All we need to do is force the debate.

RS: Are you confident you would win that debate?

RFK, JR: Yes. I will obliterate them. It's not
because I'm a great debater, it's just that they have no factual basis for their
assertions. I've read virtually all the science—both sides—and I know the
flimsiness of the reed upon which they rest their theology.

RS: You said this is the sickest generation in history.
Is this hyperbole?

RFK, JR: Ask any school nurse who has been around
for a few decades. In addition to autism, we now have epidemics of other
neurological disorders like ADD, ADHD, tics and narcolepsy, SIDS, and seizure
disorder. The CDC says that one in every six US children now suffers from a
developmental disorder. This is not normal. Asthma and food allergies are also
suddenly exploding in the same thimerosal-exposed generation. School infirmaries
have whole cupboards for the Epi pens and inhalers. All of these conditions are
associated in the scientific literature with vaccines, mercury, and with
thimerosal specifically. Think about when you were in school. How many people
did you know with peanut allergies and autism? EPA scientists found that the
greatest increase in ASD prevalence occurred in cohorts born between 1987 and
1992. The so called "changepoint year" was 1988. That's the timeframe that the
CDC began expanding the vaccine schedule, increasing mercury exposures from
75mcg to 237.5 mcg before the second birthday.

RS: The fact that it's mainly boys who are injured is
additional evidence of mercury's central role?

RFK, JR: Mercury disproportionately affects boys
because testosterone amplifies the neurotoxic effects of mercury. Conversely,
estrogen wraps the mercury molecule and protects the female brain. That's why
these disorders tend to selectively affect males and girls with unusually high
testosterone. Any scientist genuinely searching for the cause of this epidemic
must begin by identifying a toxin that suddenly increased across every
demographic in 1988 and affects boys at a 4 to 1 ratio.

RS: Parents of vaccine-injured children were heartened
to learn that you and your law partner are trying to subpoena CDC whistleblower,
Dr. William Thompson for the Hazelhurst case in Tennessee. Can you let our
readers know how that's going?

Yates' case survived the dismissal of the other 5,000 cases
in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding. His is the only case in 30 years that has been
allowed to allege that vaccines can cause autism. His case survived because
Yates' parents sued not just the pharmaceutical company but also Yates'
pediatrician for breaching his standard of care. The biggest impediments against
Yates' prevailing are the 2004 IOM declaration that vaccines are not linked to
autism and the Supreme Court's Bruesewitz holding which relied on the IOM. These
decisions both rested heavily on Dr. Thompson's Pediatrics study
published in 2004. Dr. Thompson now says that the study was the product
of fraud, data manipulation, and data destruction. That study has been cited in
at least 110 subsequent studies published in PubMed and is the principle
foundation of the orthodoxy that vaccines are not causing autism. We've asked to
subpoena Dr. Thompson because his testimony will show that the central
foundation stone for the orthodoxy is fraudulent. Under federal law, you can't
subpoena a federal agency employee unless you can show that his testimony
couldn't be obtained from any other source. Of course, that's true in this case
because there were only 4 people who witnessed the CDC data dump and nobody else
is talking. However, the federal law requires that the first step in that
process is to petition the head of the agency and ask for permission to subpoena
the employee. CDC Director Dr. Thomas Friedan denied our request, which was not
a surprise. The CDC has much to lose from Thompson's truthful testimony. We are
now appealing that decision in federal court.

RS: How can people who want to help with your efforts
get involved?

RFK, JR: They can go to our
website and sign
up to be members of the World Mercury Project. Also, because we're going to
litigate against the CDC and certain state health commissioners, we need members
for standing. If you're willing to be a member for standing and you have a child
injured by thimerosal or if you yourself were injured by thimerosal, let us
know. Even if you have no known vaccine injuries in your family, we can use you.
Right now we are trying to sign up pregnant women and parents with young
children for planned litigation in New York, California, Iowa, Missouri,
Illinois, and Delaware. We would love to sign you up as a member. That doesn't
mean you'll be involved in the litigation. In most cases, we would just need to
get an affidavit from you. We need to sign up as many parents of vaccine-injured
children as possible. Just go to the World Mercury Project website and say you
support our efforts.

Parents and vaccine safety advocates gathered in October
at the CDC to protest the agency's vaccine research fraud. (Left to Right)
Catherine Masha, Tony Muhammad, Stefanie Van, Cynthia Reece.

RS: Is there anything we as parents can do?

RFK, JR: World Mercury Project also has an effort
we're calling our Virtual
Senate Hearing Project where we are getting mothers and fathers to tell
their stories about their vaccine-injured children. We are working with the
Vaxxed team on this project. We need short home videos, less than two minutes.
We want parents to tell their stories as if they were speaking in a Senate
hearing. We welcome the participation of anyone who has a vaccine-injury story
to tell. We want to create an archive of stories from the autism generation.
Just go to the website for instructions.

RS: Earlier, you mentioned the heavy toll it takes on
scientists and celebrities to question vaccine safety. Do you have concerns
about your own career and reputation or safety for speaking out on vaccine
injury?

RFK, JR: Those things are irrelevant to me. The
injuries that I've suffered from a decade of attacks by Pharma's trolls and
toadies are dwarfed by the agonies experienced by an autistic child and his
family during a single hour of any single day. I don't know what to make of the
countless journalists, scientists and doctors who have told me that they can't
speak up because of their careers…or maybe I do. Einstein said that "The world
is a dangerous place not because of those who do evil, but because of those who
look on and do nothing."

For more information on the World Autism Project and to get
involved, click
here.